A priest who gives gang members a job. Inventors who tinker with zero-emission motorcycles. Indian girls who learn to strut runways or shoot rifles. Collectors who track down rare exotic fruits. Everyone who's lived in 20th century London.

What do these folks have in common? They're all subjects of films in the Docurama series, an attempt by the Los Angeles company Cinedigm to revolutionize what movies you see and how to see them.

Alamo Drafthouse theaters will screen the series in San Antonio, beginning Thursday with “G-DOG.”

Cinedigm has been involved in the digitization of movie theaters, an endeavor not without controversy. They've converted more than 12,000 screens from 35mm to digital projection, says Steve Savage, co-president of Cinedigm Entertainment.

“It's been a three- or four- or five-year process of figuring this thing out,” Savage says. “The theaters wanted the studios to pay for it, the studios wanted the theaters to pay for it. There was a logjam for a long time, and Cinedigm was the one that came up with this plan that has everybody kicking in for these digital projectors.”

Now he says theaters should be able to break away from requiring a set number of playdates for each film in each room because they no longer have to move heavy cans of film, an expense that many films wouldn't recoup. With digital delivery, theaters should have more flexibility to program alternative titles.

That's the idea behind Docurama. In San Antonio, the seven-week series — films will screen once a week — will alternate among Alamo Drafthouse's three locations. The series takes its name from Cinedigm's Docurama Films, an established label for releasing documentaries on DVD.

“We've always aspired to putting them in theaters, and digital theatres allow us to fulfill that dream,” Savage says.

The films aren't streamed. They're mostly delivered on hard drives; sometimes a file is delivered through the Internet. Theaters program a server to show a certain film at a certain time on a certain screen, almost like an app, he says.

“This is a real innovation and opening up great possibilities for movie theaters,” Savage says. “The Met Opera screenings in theaters was a breakthrough showing how there's an audience for stuff besides Hollywood blockbuster movies, and we're going down the road now with documentaries.”

He's sure the audience is there.

“We go to film festivals all the time and we're amazed at all the enthusiasm and interest for documentaries, so we're modeling this on a festival,” he says.

Each program begins with a three-minute doc about some innovative idea from GE's Focus Forward program. The main feature is followed by a pre-recorded interview with the director.

Savage says they've gleaned this first batch from attending Sundance, South by Southwest, Toronto and other festivals.

“We have a team that goes out there looking for films, and what we've come up with is what we call the best of the best,” he says. “These are the best films that are coming out of recent film festivals that are working for us and getting the word out there for films people would otherwise not be able to see.”

For this premiere outing, Cinedigm is working with a small group of theaters.

“We want to be able to work very closely with the theaters to make sure we get the right audience development, the right promotion, the right presentation,” Savage says. “After this first round, we're going to expand it to somewhere between 45 and 75 theaters, and we eventually hope to get in excess of 150 theaters as the series grows in stature and popularity.”

The digital system means no beat-up prints need to be shipped from city to city and all venues can show the same film around the same time, which makes it possible to generate buzz across the country via social media like Facebook.

“Our goal is to have the films screen the same week,” Savage says. “Some Hollywood films open up on 1,000 screens or 2,000 screens, but a lot of films open up on 150 or 200 screens. We're giving these filmmakers the footprint of a tremendous national day-and-date premiere.”